Kelsey Brennan and Marcus Truschinski try the Wilde life in American Players Theatre’s production of Tom Stoppard’s ‘Travesties.’

George Bernard Shaw's 'Doctor's Dilemma' also opens in Spring Green

Spring Green — Imagine unleashing all that barely restrained libido from Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" — in which appetites must at least pretend to play by old-fashioned rules — and one gets an idea of what Tom Stoppard is up to in "Travesties," a scintillating homage to a writer Stoppard admires and resembles.

Both that resemblance and Stoppard's brilliance are on full display at American Players Theatre, where director William Brown's just-opened production of "Travesties" riffs on Brown's smashing, currently running APT production of "Earnest." Taken in tandem, they're the highlight of a strong APT season.

Stoppard's setup is grounded in fact: During World War I, neutral Zurich played host to James Joyce, writing "Ulysses"; V.I. Lenin, just before the Russian Revolution; and Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of the Dada art movement.

While writing his masterpiece, Joyce also found time to serve as business manager for a theater troupe. Its first production? "The Importance of Being Earnest," with a cast including Henry Carr, a soldier who was badly wounded and caught in no man's land for five days before finding his way to a job in Britain's Zurich consulate.

"Travesties" looks back on this tumultuous time through a fictionalized older Carr's wandering and unreliable mind. And because this Carr is himself something of a frustrated actor, his recollections are refracted through fond and fizzy memories of his star turn as Algernon in that long-ago Zurich "Earnest."

Carr's errant memory reduces historical figures to characters in Wilde's play; Carr, for example, confuses himself with Algernon and confuses Tzara with Jack Worthing. Brown underscores this confusion by tapping the same fabulous quartet of younger actors for both "Earnest" and "Travesties."

Marcus Truschinski plays Algernon in "Earnest" and Carr here; Matt Schwader plays Jack in "Earnest" and Tzara here. Cristina Panfilio morphs from a Gwendolen who is Lady Bracknell's daughter to a Gwendolen who is Henry Carr's sister and a Joyce disciple. Kelsey Brennan's "Earnest" Cecily is now Cecily the librarian and a Lenin disciple.

Reflecting the transition from the 1913 London of Brown's "Earnest" to the 1917 Zurich of "Travesties," Matthew J. LeFebvre dresses the cast in the same costumes, now slightly worn or showing modest changes — Brennan's less frilly Cecily now wears a tie, Panfilio's skirt has lost its hobble and hemlines are slightly higher — suggesting characters who are now four years older.

And who have moved from a world still stuck in fusty Victorian propriety to a world blown apart by war. "Earnest" takes place in a milieu where the old rules still held, however threadbare they might have become; one could be earnest about whether someone was named Ernest, because words had relatively stable meanings.

But all bets are off after killing fields like Ypres dynamite once-cherished ideals — a point driven home with particular force by Truschinski, giving one of the finest performances of his increasingly impressive career.

As Carr obsessively recalls his harrowing life in the trenches, Truschinski makes clear how hard it is for this ostensibly hearty and proper Brit to maintain a stiff upper lip, given all he has endured.

Much as Truschinski toggles between the dashing young figure Carr once cut and the shuffling old man he has since become, he also gives us both the cheery British soldier marching off to war in 1914 and the dazed survivor who finds his way to Switzerland in 1917. It's as though the entire history of this horrific war were reduced to one man's efforts to make sense of his scrambled memories of very different past selves.

Art and politics

With all he's been through, no wonder Carr doesn't see eye to eye with Schwader's Tzara, for whom the scrambling of words and ideas is an aesthetic and political statement. Suspicious of all efforts to make meaning — and convinced that words such as patriotism and duty are pious frauds — Tzara has little use for the war that almost cost Carr his life.

Making his case, Schwader's Tzara — insouciant, flamboyant, funny and clever — gets astounding mileage from the phrase "dada," endlessly repeated and always different. Irresistibly joyful, he helps us appreciate how playful language and art can be, even as we're simultaneously sympathetic to Carr's belief that words must mean and matter — and that artists have a responsibility to make the world better.

Presented through a vaudevillian series of sketches that include strip teases, limericks, song and dance, "Travesties" is filled with a prism's worth of variations on this debate about the role of art and artists.

Nate Burger's Joyce offers a moving defense of why great art is its own defense; ditto Panfilio, in reciting a famous Shakespeare sonnet about art's ability to trump time. Meanwhile, Carr overcomes political differences to find himself aesthetically aligned with Eric Parks' Lenin, insisting that art must serve a social purpose in the here and now.

Along the way, "Travesties" yields a trove of fragments from great works of literature, reflecting Joyce's own approach in "Ulysses" — itself embedded, as is "Earnest," throughout this play. "Earnest" invariably comes with a twist, including Jeb Burris as a version of Algernon's servant, offering a cheeky and comic variant on the workers' uprising in Russia.

From costumes and props to how scenes are staged and the gestures characters make, there are scores of such twisted carry-overs from the APT "Earnest." One particularly arresting example: An abstract painting from "Earnest" of what looks like but can't quite be read as a word reappears in "Travesties" as broken and separated panels, akin to the scraps of paper into which Tzara gleefully scissors great poems.

Long journey

But for all the frequently farcical cut-ups in this production, Brown never lets us forget what a watershed 1914 was — and how far these characters have traveled from the comparatively carefree world in which "Earnest" unfolds.

As a result, the debates about art in this "Travesties" aren't just fun and witty, but also passionate and deeply felt, reflecting a post-1914 world in which we've never needed art more in helping us make sense of who and where we are.

'Doctor's Dilemma'

Questions regarding the value of art also play a prominent role in George Bernard Shaw's "The Doctor's Dilemma," which debuted Saturday night under Aaron Posner's direction.

Colenso's colleague is an honorable man and average doctor who serves the poor. Louis is avowedly amoral, cheating on his wife and cadging funds from anyone gullible enough to lend; he's also an undisputed genius.

While trying to decide what to do, Colenso talks to a trio of colleagues, including a gregarious and well-meaning windbag given an appropriately broad and funny turn by John Pribyl, who continually threatens to steal the show.

"To me, it's a plain choice between a man and a lot of pictures," another of those colleagues — Colenso's retired mentor (Paul Bentzen) — tells him. As this formulation suggests, Colenso's mentor would choose the obscure doctor over the artist.

But on scenic designer Andrew Boyce's striking backdrop of 56 portraits, those "pictures" include masterpieces like Manet's portrait of Berthe Morisot, herself a painter. Taken in the aggregate, Boyce's gallery embodies the unquantifiable value of great artists, while also providing a vivid illustration that all lives matter — and that choosing among them is monstrous.

Further muddying the moral waters, Jennifer (Abbey Siegworth) — Louis' wife — is beautiful. The significantly older Colenso fancies her — and therefore can't help but fancy himself as her husband, should Louis die.

Breaking fourth wall

Posner's opening gambit — in which the assembled actors break the fourth wall to describe their own experiences with doctors — sharpens the parallels between Shaw's play and the way our society organizes the distribution of health care. So too did a real medical emergency, which interrupted the first act for almost 30 minutes as doctors in the audience assisted a patron.

But topicality only gets you so far. Despite the cast's solid acting, a judiciously pruned script and Posner's deft incorporation of Shaw's descriptions of his characters — spoken here by the actors who play them as they make their first appearance — the characters in "Dilemma" are little more than one-dimensioned ideograms, in a play long on speeches and short on dramatic energy.

Those speeches and the ideas they express are almost always interesting; Louis, for example, is provocatively compelling when he channels his inner Alfred Doolittle and takes the moralistic docs down a notch. But as with Doolittle and most of the characters in this play, it's hard to believe in Louis as an actual person.

Siegworth's Jennifer is the one consistent exception. This Jennifer is played less naively than she's written; Siegworth gives her sharpened edges and elbows that make Jennifer a bit like her husband, using her looks as he uses his charm to advance their mutual cause.

Why does Jennifer do it?

True to form, Shaw tells us rather than shows us. Considered in light of a textured performance like Siegworth gives, Shaw's explanation is neither convincing nor satisfying. That's par for the course in this overly talky and chalky play, in which Shaw can be as guilty as his physicians of reducing people to abstractions.

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Keep up with the art scene and trends in urban design with art and architecture critic Mary Louise Schumacher. Every week, you'll get the latest reviews, musings on architecture and her picks for what to do on the weekends.

E-mail Newsletter

Keep up with the art scene and trends in urban design with art and architecture critic Mary Louise Schumacher. Every week, you'll get the latest reviews, musings on architecture and her picks for what to do on the weekends.